of sun, and as soft as he’d imagined. And when he was finished running his fingers through it—at least for now—he didn’t let go. He held on to a hank of her hair, as if he needed it. As if it was some kind of talisman.
Or she was.
“At first it was just sad.” He didn’t like talking about any of this. It only occurred to him then that he never had before. Because who could he have told? Everyone had already come to their own conclusions. “She would contrive to be somewhere I was and the next thing I knew there was a photograph in a tabloid, and breathless speculation about whether or not we were back on. At first I didn’t even realize that she was the one calling the paparazzi herself. But as time went on, of course, the coverage took a distinctly darker turn.”
He didn’t know what he expected from Eleanor. An instant refusal, perhaps. After all, Isobel had been a sunny ambassador of goodwill. Everyone said so. She had been all that was light and good and the only strange thing she ever done in her life, according to the coverage of her that she’d manipulated constantly, was try to date a monster like Hugo. It wouldn’t have surprised him if Eleanor had argued with him. If she’d tried to deny the story that he was telling.
But she didn’t say a word. Her solemn gaze was fixed to his, and she seemed ready enough to hear him out.
No one else had ever given him that courtesy. Hugo felt something sharp, wedged there in the vicinity of his heart, but he had no name for it.
“As time went on Isobel became more and more unhinged. She got together with Torquil, of course, but that wasn’t enough for her. Because the truth was, she knew that wouldn’t hurt me. If he wanted to be with her that meant nothing to me either way, and that was what she couldn’t stand. It was right about the time she convinced my friend, who’d known me all his life, that I’d treated her abusively in private that it occurred to me her only real goal was to hurt me. However possible.”
“If you didn’t care for her at all,” Eleanor said softly, “and you weren’t even involved with her in the ways she claimed, how could she ever have hurt you?” She seemed to think better of that as she said it. “Your friend’s betrayal must have hurt, of course.”
Hugo shrugged. “Sometimes a woman comes between friends. To be honest, I wasn’t worried. I thought that he’d come out of it with continued exposure to her.”
“I can’t pretend to know how it feels to have lies about myself splashed all over the paper,” Eleanor began.
“It was my father.”
It sat there so starkly. That ugly little truth that Hugo had never dared utter out loud before to anyone but Isobel, and only that once. And not only because there was no one else to hear it. But because naming it gave it power and he had never wanted to do that. He had never wanted to give Isobel the satisfaction—not even in death.
“I was all the old man had,” Hugo managed to say, aware there was a kind of earthquake in him, tearing through him and reducing him to rubble. And yet he stood. “And I was a terrible disappointment to him.”
“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” Eleanor breathed, that honey in her dark eyes gleaming with sympathy. “Maybe you only thought he felt that way.”
“I know he felt that way, little one.” Hugo’s voice was soft. “He told me so.”
And he stopped trying to fight that feeling inside of him then. That sharp thing in his chest only seemed to bleed out more at that stricken look on Eleanor’s lovely face. As if she couldn’t imagine such a thing, that an old man could think so little of his only son.
But Hugo knew he had.
“My father was prepared to put up with a certain amount of foolishness, because he was old-school and he’d had what he called his ‘day in the sun.’ He very much believed that boys were indeed boys.” Hugo felt his mouth curve, though it was no smile. “But his expectation was that such conduct unbecoming in a Duke of Grovesmoor would end. If not during my university years, then shortly thereafter. Except I met Isobel two years after I left Cambridge, when I was still committed to every wild oat a man could sow. And that was when she started her campaign.”
“Surely your father didn’t believe the tabloids.”
“Of course not. My father would never sully his eyes with such trash. The trouble wasn’t the tabloids themselves. It was that everyone who did read the tabloids accepted everything they read in them as fact. And it wasn’t only the scandal rags. There were cleverly disguised hit pieces in more reputable magazines that made me seem seedy and vaguely disgusting. And soon enough, that was how I was discussed. Not just in salacious news programs, but right here, in my father’s own home. To his face.”
“Who would do something like that?” Eleanor asked, and if he hadn’t been looking right at her, with her eyes wide and filled with distress, he might have imagined she was faking. “And why would your father believe the kind of person who would slander his own son directly to him?”
It was an excellent question, and one Hugo wished he could ask the old man.
“Sometimes a rumor is far worse than a fact,” he said instead. “Facts can be proven or disproven, most of the time. But rumor can live on forever. It commands a life of its own and dignified silence doesn’t refute it. And sooner or later, whether you mean to or not, you find that you’re living in it. Against your will.”
“There was nothing you could do?” She shook her head as if to clear it. “No way you could tell the truth?”
“That’s the thing about rumors like that, little one,” Hugo murmured. “They’re more believable than the truth. My father was a man of the world. He’d flirted with his own share of potential scandals in his day. It made no sense to him that a pretty girl like Isobel, who could have anyone, would waste her time pretending to have a relationship with the one man who didn’t want her. And I think you’ll find that it didn’t make sense to anyone else, either.”
“But surely you could prove it.”
“How?” Hugo wasn’t surprised when Eleanor didn’t have an answer. “Where there’s smoke, people always look for a fire. And the more that fire burns, the more everyone believes that you must have had a hand in setting it, or you’d put it out. But Isobel had no intention of ever letting it die down.”
He thought of that endless blue afternoon in all that Santa Barbara sunshine. The way Isobel had smiled at him.
You’ll always be mine, Hugo. Always. No matter where you go or what you do, no one will ever see you without thinking of me.
“I’m surprised you didn’t date her just to keep her quiet,” Eleanor said then, scowling furiously—but not, for once, at him. “Just to make her stop.”
Hugo let out a low noise. “I thought about it, of course. But I didn’t want to be anywhere near her. And then, of course, came Geraldine.”
“None of this is her fault,” Eleanor said at once. Fiercely.
“Of course not,” Hugo said shortly. “I don’t bear the child any ill will.”
“But—”
“But I don’t mind if the world thinks I do,” he finished for her. He shook his head. “Before there was Geraldine, there was Isobel and her pregnancy. And believe me, she used it like a hammer.” He dropped that piece of Eleanor’s hair then, because his hands were curling into fists and he thought he’d better keep them to himself. “She told my father the child was mine.”
“She left you. She married your friend. How could it be yours?”
“She didn’t leave me.” Hugo realized he’d growled that out like a savage, and fought for calm. “We were never together. But she told my father that we had been. And then she told him that I refused to do my duty. That I told her to get rid of it. That I was, in short, every bit the callous and unfeeling character she’d painted me in the tabloids.